In a new report, doctors who receive at least one free meal from a pharmaceutical marketing or sales person, would most likely to prescribe the drug that was being promoted as opposed to a generic brand substitute that was available.

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According to lead author of the study, Dr. R. Adams Dudley from the University of California, San Francisco, every year in the United States alone, about $73 billion is spent on branded drugs even when there is a generic equivalent readily available, as patients pay $24 billion from that amount from their own pockets.

He reveals that branded drugs and generics are so similar to each other that there is no benefit at all from using the branded versions.

In this new study, the team analyzed pharmaceutical drugs payment data from the end of 2013 including the prescribing data from doctors that treated Medicare patients with common or generic drugs for heart problems or depression.

Researchers have chosen the most prescribed brand name for each class of drug. For example, doctors chose Crestor (rosuvastatin) for statins and Bystolic (nebivolol) for beta blockers and Benicar (olmesartan) for ACE inhibitors. For depression, doctors chose Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) for antidepressants which is a selective serotonin and SNRIs (serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors).

Dudley reveals that national organizations in the U.S. and the United Kingdom have classified these branded drugs to not perform any better than their generic versions.

From this study, about 280,000 doctors received a total of more than 60,000 payments that prescribed the four branded drugs mentioned earlier. About 95 percent of the majority of the payments were apparently in the form of sponsored meals that costs an average of less than $20 each.

The results also yield that nine percent of the statin prescriptions were rosuvastatin while the remaining drugs were prescribed less often.

Doctors who receive at least one sponsored meal from the pharmaceutical companies were more likely to prescribe the branded drugs mentioned over a generic alternative, as opposed to doctors who did not receive any sponsored meals. As these sponsored meals increase, or the value of each meal increases, the prescribing rates also increase.

The results of this new study is published in the journal, JAMA Internal Medicine.

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